BRUNETIÈRE, FERDINAND. — French literary critic, b. in Toulon on 19 July 1849, d. in Paris on 9 December 1906. He began contributing to the Revue des Deux Mondes as early as 1875, becoming its director in 1895. In 1886 he was appointed « maître de conférences » at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Member of the Académie française from 1895.
A profound student of the French seventeenth century, endowed with extensive philosophical and scientific reading, which (rather than developing independently in thought) he subordinated to his constant polemical effort, B. repeatedly sought to reconcile Darwin and Spencer with the history of literary genres, arriving at bold but poorly grounded inferences. His critical methodology was empirical, bound above all to an eminently classicist, anti-decadent, anti-impressionist evaluation of literature, and increasingly approaching the poetic and cultural taste of the French Renaissance (see the 9 vols. of the Etudes critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française [Paris 1880–1925]; Le roman naturaliste [ibid. 1883]; Histoire de la littérature française classique [ibid. 1904]).
Of considerable importance for the history of French Catholic thought and culture was his return to religion, whose ideal stages can be documented in La science et la religion [ibid. 1895]. Skillfully bending and resolving the conclusions of Comte’s positivism within Christian thought, he waged a highly refined battle against Renan (v. E. R. [ibid. 1903], and Pages sur E. R. [ibid. 1924]), in favor of the bourgeois social tradition of Catholic France (cf. his social and political « raisons » in the Discours de combat [ibid. 1900–1907]), and in favor of a classicist-Catholic « restoration » of the French spirit.
der Lugt, L'action religieuse de F. B., Paris 1936; E. Hocking, F. B., the evolution of a critic, Madison 1936; V. Giraud, La critique littéraire, Paris 1945, pp. 30 sgg., 185 sgg.